Page 50 of The Turning of the Tables

Eight percent of people who caught Arcana died. Two out of every twenty-five. Just under one out of ten. If you know thirteen people, statistically, one of them will die from Arcanavirus.

And thirteen percent ended up Arc-human or Arcanid. More than one in ten.

That was one in five lives irreparably changed. Some clearly for the worse—since being dead is definitely worse than being alive. Others—well, it depended on your perspective, I guess. With all the anti-Nid bigotry, I guess you could say becoming a Nid was worse than not. Certainly there were things about it that would get harder.

I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want to become either an Arc or a Nid, either. I knew what that meant—I knew the constant passive aggression faced by Nids, especially those who no longer looked human—orcs, fauns, vampires, ghouls. Shifters might be able to pass as human—sometimes—but now shifters had to register, and their status was all but public. Maybe you could go to the grocery store without dealing with bullshit, but holding down a good job or having human rights... And if you became an Arc, there was the constant anxiety, either because you didn’t want to be outed, or because your life was now filled with the dead, with visions or flashes of emotion that weren’t yours…

I didn’t want any of that, either. Because I’d seen it.

I knew what my brother went through every day, and he had a job working with other shifters, a job where people cared about his well-being and the people around him accepted him for who and what he was. And he still went through hell.

I’d watched Ward speak to dozens, maybe hundreds of dead people over the years. I’d seen what it took out of him, and I understood that he was one of the most powerful mediums in the whole damn state of Virginia. Maybe the mid-Atlantic region. Maybe farther, I don’t know. The point was, his Arcane ability exhausted him—mentally and emotionally. Maybe physically, too.

I had enough days that were a struggle, enough days where fatigue made my limbs heavy and my brain slow, where my joints ached and swelled, where someone put a little butter or milk into something and forgot, leaving my intestines in shreds and my airways constricted—if I was lucky. If I wasn’t, it meant a trip to the hospital and enough adrenaline to leave me jumpy for the next twelve hours before I crashed for the twenty-four after that.

I had no desire to add Arc abilities or being a Nid on top of that. And I definitely didn’t want to be dead.

If I got sick, would I be the four out of five? The odds were in my favor, except…

Odds were rarely in my favor.

14

SETH MAYS

Did you get contact traced, when you got sick?

Sorry if that’s too personal.

ELLIOT CRANE

It’s not.

And no, I didn’t.

We never figured out how Dad and I got it.

Did your dad become a badger, too?

Yeah.

Why are you asking me this now?

Do you feel sick?

No.

I got contact traced.Work.

Again.

Does that happen a lot?

Not really.

I can’t talk about it.

Because of your brother?